Pulitzer Prize winners announced, feature writing declared dead

By Andrea Battleground | April 15, 2014 | 5:30pm

Aux Features Books

This year’s Pulitzer Prize winners have been announced, and for the most part the journalism awards went as expected. The big winners are The Washington Post and The Guardian US, both of which were recognized in the Public Service category for their reportage and contextualizing of the Edward Snowden-leaked documents that led to the revelation that the NSA knows exactly what you’re using the Internet for, you sick bastard. The Breaking News prize went to The Boston Globe for its coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing. The New York Times’ Josh Haner won the Photography prize for capturing the horror of the Boston Marathon bombing. Surprisingly, there was no Pulitzer awarded for Feature Writing this year, as the jury failed to reach a verdict on a winner among the three nominees. This result mirrors a similar situation with the Literature prize in 2012, when apparently no fiction book published the previous year was deemed good enough for a Pulitzer.

The list of winners on the Literature, Drama, and Music side were less controversial, with the fiction prize going to Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, about the adolescent survivor of a terrorist bombing attack and his relationship with a painting. Other winners include Annie Baker’s The Flick for drama, Alan Taylor’s The Internal Enemy for history, Vijay Seshadri’s 3 Sections for poetry, Dan Fagin’s Toms River for nonfiction, and John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean for music composition.